WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

kyle_h · 2025-06-19 23:39:44

About four days ago the wine package was fiddled with to make wine's new way of dealing with 64bittedness of windows programs the default.

https://archlinux.org/news/transition-t … e-staging/

The news post advises:

"If you are facing issues with 32 bit prefixes, please recreate these and reinstall the application."

Let's try that:

 [kyle@DS9 ~]$ WINEPREFIX="$HOME/wine32" WINEARCH=win32 wine wineboot
wine: WINEARCH is set to 'win32' but this is not supported in wow64 mode.

The arch wiki does not advise.

Last edited by kyle_h (2025-06-19 23:40:03)

Scimmia · 2025-06-19 23:41:13

Recreate...but not as a 32 bit prefix.

kyle_h · 2025-06-19 23:58:11

No. Photoshop CS6 has a dependency on ie6, which does not install in a 64 bit environment.

If breaking compatibility with software that needs 32 bit prefixes is meant to be a permanent "improvement" I'll just roll back wine and stick it on the package blacklist. (Usually I only do that when someone ruins their app by using libadwaita)

Last edited by kyle_h (2025-06-19 23:58:58)

skunktrader · 2025-06-20 01:26:57

kyle_h wrote:

If breaking compatibility with software that needs 32 bit prefixes is meant to be a permanent "improvement" I'll just roll back wine and stick it on the package blacklist.

I don't think that will be a long-term solution. What about all the lib32- dependencies for wine?

cloverskull · 2025-06-20 05:41:05

Maybe someone (not volunteering) can investigate putting together something like a wine32 PKGBUILD and get it on the AUR.

I think I see both sides - wine is useful not just for running contemporary stuff but also retro stuff that there's no real other way to use. Sometimes these things can be important. *shrug* but it's unwise to make the average user of wine that doesn't care about 32/64 bit have to download all those libs. That's a lot of wasted bandwidth, some people are metered, wasted disk space, etc. I'm all for removing the general dependency for the general public and shifting to WOW64.

But this is precisely why the AUR exists.

Lone_Wolf · 2025-06-20 10:05:07

For now, switch to https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/wine-stable as that still has the win32 support .

damnbug · 2025-06-20 13:16:10

Yes, Wine is broken. I'm sticking to 10.8-2.

Crouze · 2025-06-20 19:45:58

I understand the move to WoW64 in Wine, but it also feels a bit arrogant to assume that every 32 bit Windows application will run on 64 bit with WoW64. The fact that the developers / maintainers / decision makers don't have any Windows applications that break, doesn't mean others now do feel the pain. I don't mind the re-installing of wineprefixes and Windows applications, but it would have been nice if more thought had been given to this problem and a decent way out (apart from blocking upgrades) or alternatives given, even if it was only in documentation.

Anyway...I have such an application, it's a VB6 program which requires MDAC 2.8, which famously doesn't work on any 64 bit machine. What I ended up doing this week was:

- Move all other Win32 applications I had on my Win32 prefix to the 64 bit prefix (I already had both).
- Removed the Win32 prefix and upgraded Wine to 10.9.
- Manually build 10.8.1 from the source on WineHQ, without 64bit support, and installed it away from the existing Wine.
- Installed my VB6 program in the Win32 Wine, of course with its own 32bit prefix.
- Made menu entries for both the "normal" Wine installation, and the 32bit one (with its specific WINEARCH, WINEPREFIX and WINE environment variables).
- Now the "normal" Wine can be kept to the latest release, and the other one is specific to that one application and will forever (?) be left alone.

It may sound like a bit of overkill to have two Wines on my machine, but this works for me, for as long as there is no (probably never will) proper solution to have true 32bit in Wine 10.9+ . And I must admit it is nice to have just one Wine for all the other Windows applications, regardless if these are 32 or 6 bit thanks to WoW64.

I could have probably build 10.10 from WineHQ without the 64bit support, but 10.8.1 seemed appropriate as it is the last Win32 Wine release on Arch.

0xjmz · 2025-06-21 15:27:03

I'm experiencing the same problem – a lot of older apps aren't working well, or are running very slowly. It looks like WoW64 is still experimental. I wonder if having separate Wine32 and Wine64 packages might be a good idea. I understand the change, but it seems somewhat premature at this stage. Now, I will rebuild Wine myself, using the `wine-10.8-1` PKGBUILD as a starting point. I anticipate that a significant number of other applications will also be affected.

MajorMayer · 2025-06-22 19:18:11

VirtualDub (used in this AUR package : https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/otr- … ng3p-vdub) is negatively affected by this change as well, because apparently there is no 64-bit version with plugin support and this situation will most likely not change anytime.
With the change it cannot be launched anymore.

For now, switching to wine-stable did the trick, but before this will remove 32-bit support as well, it would be great to have a separate 32-bit Wine version (maybe in the multilib repo?).

skirmish · 2025-06-22 22:31:15

Did anybody try building this under Arch:

https://github.com/MIvanchev/static-wine32

Statically linking (mostly) all libraries would make sure that any upgrades to lib32-* libraries wouldn't break this "frozen in time" wine32.

BS86 · 2025-06-23 07:43:38

you guys really use wine for multiple programs and have no prefix-management software like lutris (or others) in place?
You can easily use several wine versions with those tools and they make managing prefixes easy.
Personally, most of my wine prefixes simply use the system wine, and they still work. Those that don't use system wine aren't affected by the changes and still work, they didn't work with system wine anyway.

Side note: Even Steam uses several Proton versions for their games, they are basically also separate wine prefixes.

Last edited by BS86 (2025-06-23 07:45:05)

masu33 · 2025-06-24 18:27:10

BS86 wrote:

you guys really use wine for multiple programs and have no prefix-management software like lutris (or others) in place?

Yes.

gsus · 2025-06-26 21:24:52

Lone_Wolf wrote:

For now, switch to https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/wine-stable as that still has the win32 support .

This works for me (wine-stable). I have an SmartVMs for my house cameras that not work on win64.

0xjmz · 2025-06-29 07:52:44

Well, if someone doesn't want to go full WOW64 like me, because OpenGL for old games runs poorly, then I build the AUR package "wine32" that follow Wine 10.8-1 PKGBUILD with lib32-* to newer versions.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/wine32

Last edited by 0xjmz (2025-06-29 08:18:43)

Ambos · 2025-06-30 06:06:48

BS86 wrote:

you guys really use wine for multiple programs and have no prefix-management software like lutris (or others) in place?
You can easily use several wine versions with those tools and they make managing prefixes easy.
Personally, most of my wine prefixes simply use the system wine, and they still work. Those that don't use system wine aren't affected by the changes and still work, they didn't work with system wine anyway.
Side note: Even Steam uses several Proton versions for their games, they are basically also separate wine prefixes.

Do non-WoW64 Lutris/Bottles runners require 32-bit dependencies which were previously required by the "wine" package in Extra (like "lib32-gettext" or "lib32-libxrandr")? If so, shouldn't Lutris (or other Wine front-ends) require them too? Otherwise, if people need 32-bit prefixes or have issues with WoW64 builds in some cases, the easiest workaround seems to install some of the AUR packages mentioned in this thread.

archdub · 2025-06-30 08:02:19

My little story, in case it helps someone.
I have wine installed on my home desktop just to be able to run an ancient win32 app from WinXP times. This simple app does not require installation, and can be put in any Windows folder. Back in WinXP times i had it in c:\mywin32app.
This is what i did do to get it working with the new wine version:
1. renamed ~/.wine as ~/.wineold
2. on a console i entered 'wine cmd'. This created a fresh ~/.wine folder, with about 1 GB less that than ~/.wineold. This took a while to run due to my slow spinning disk. I exited the windows console. There are other ways to create a fresh ~/.wine folder, see the wiki.
3. copied ~/.wineold/drive_c/mywin32app to ~/.wine/drive_c/mywin32app
4. deleted ~/.wineold
5. uninstalled all lib32-* packages. This freed up about 0.5 GB disk space.
6. in /etc/pacman.conf i commented out the lines for multilib.
In the end the app works fine with the new wine and i freed up a total of about 1.5 GB disk space.

Sidekick · 2025-06-30 14:22:39

Couldn't a wine32 package be provided by Arch? It worries me that so many distributions are trying to get rid of 32-bit libraries when there is no measurable benefit in removing them and, indeed, there is a very measurable, negative impact on the userbase.

Hanabishi · 2025-07-11 10:26:26

Better report regressions to the Wine upstream. They do communicate with users and fix stuff.
WoW64 is the way to go and another step to inevitable multilib elimination. For anyone claiming that maintaining lib32 is not that hard - volunteer for doing that then, so maintainers won't need to spend their time on it.

SimonJ · 2025-07-11 11:10:54

Sidekick wrote:

Couldn't a wine32 package be provided by Arch? It worries me that so many distributions are trying to get rid of 32-bit libraries when there is no measurable benefit in removing them and, indeed, there is a very measurable, negative impact on the userbase.

Wine32 in the AUR is working for me, it runs 32 and 64bit prefixes without issue.
It took a while to build but solved all my issues.

muziknavi · 2025-07-27 07:13:20

MajorMayer wrote:

VirtualDub (used in this AUR package : https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/otr- … ng3p-vdub) is negatively affected by this change as well, because apparently there is no 64-bit version with plugin support and this situation will most likely not change anytime.

Tried virtualdub from https://github.com/gCurse/otr-verwaltun … b/releases and official virtualdub, virtualdubmod, they all launch.

mrdaltro · 2025-08-12 03:13:45

I don't know if it's the best solution, but other way to work around that is using an older version of Proton, like GE-Proton 8.32. As far as I know Proton, differently from Wine builds, carries all their libraries inside a bundle so it wouldn't be affected by the recent changes regarding Wow64. I'm able to run my older x86 program with no issues, and without having installed any older Wine version (I'm using CachyOS with only the "wine" from their repo v3 and proton-cachyos installed).

Ps.: with a prefix using the latest wine and Wow64, for some reason FineReader 10 gets really slow, to an unusable point.

Last edited by mrdaltro (2025-08-12 03:14:36)

mrechte · 2025-08-13 06:42:10

Thanks @archdub for the trick to install a fresh wine env.

Arch Linux

#1 2025-06-19 23:39:44

WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#2 2025-06-19 23:41:13

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#3 2025-06-19 23:58:11

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#4 2025-06-20 01:26:57

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#5 2025-06-20 05:41:05

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#6 2025-06-20 10:05:07

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#7 2025-06-20 13:16:10

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#8 2025-06-20 19:45:58

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#9 2025-06-21 15:27:03

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#10 2025-06-22 19:18:11

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#11 2025-06-22 22:31:15

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#12 2025-06-23 07:43:38

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#13 2025-06-24 18:27:10

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#14 2025-06-26 21:24:52

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#15 2025-06-29 07:52:44

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#16 2025-06-30 06:06:48

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#17 2025-06-30 08:02:19

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#18 2025-06-30 14:22:39

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#19 2025-07-11 10:26:26

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#20 2025-07-11 11:10:54

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#21 2025-07-27 07:13:20

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#22 2025-08-12 03:13:45

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

#23 2025-08-13 06:42:10

Re: WOW64 wine transition breaks creation of 32 bit prefixes

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